June 18ths
6/18/1898 (Berlin)
(Harry Kessler Diary)
Werthern said his great-grandmother (around 1820) led her husband when he was eight to a chapel and made him swear never to marry an ugly woman. She wanted to have a beautiful race. (Could be Goethe influence)
6/18/1930
(Edward Weston Daybooks)
“Irving and Ruby had a fascinating cutter for slicing hard-boiled eggs which they gave me to work with. The taut wire strings for slicing give it the appearance of a musical instrument, a miniature harp.”
6/18/1987 (Knokke, Belgium)
(Keith Haring Journal)
"I am sitting outside on a table made by Niki de St. Phalle, which has two huge sculpture people sitting at it also. There are so many birds here it is amazing. I am sitting across from the Dragon House, where we are living. It is really surrealistic. Writing quietly, listening to birds and looking at this dragon."
6/18/2005, Saturday
I'm enjoying The Now more and more—beautiful crystalline summer mornings, walks to the cafe for coffee and the morning paper—wonderful.
6/18/2018
I have two primary strategies in creativity: The most powerful strategy is to impose constraints on some level. In the visual arts it might be color. In music, it might be keys, meter or duration. The other strategy is the opposite of constraint, where you freely experiment, intentionally avoiding rules. This allows you to do something when there are creative blocks. The downside of free-form creativity is that it is unresolved, at which point you impose rules and constraints to finish the work. Working somewhere on this continuum will work.
6/18/2023
Last night Otis Gibbs did a video on Roger Daltrey's apparent hatred of the internet. The internet has made us at once more and less intellectual—more intellectual in the sense that we're using language for thinking and articulation of ideas—less intellectual in the sense that the objective on social media is to be a celebrity for our intellect, as one would be as a newspaper or TV columnist circa 2000, like a David Brooks or Ross Douthat. Before the internet if you wrote anything it would have to be vetted before it was published. That was the norm and you just accepted it and so people were doing less writing, although before social media people were doing a lot of writing in emails which was more convenient than using a typewriter or writing in longhand, if you didn't have a secretary taking dictation or transcribing your dictation tapes. In the 19th century and before that all people did was write in longhand and they were long correspondences. Entire books were written in longhand and then typeset. Composers wrote symphonies in longhand, and of course the beleaguered copyists, like myself circa 1983.
From Hall's Beyond Culture:
"Once people began evolving their extensions, particularly language, tools and institutions, they got caught in the web of what I term "extension transference" and as a consequence, they err in judgment and become alienated from, and in incapable of controlling the monsters they have created. In this sense, humans have advanced at the expense of that part of themselves that has been extended, and, as a consequence ended up expressing human nature in its many forms. Man’s goal from this point should be to rediscover that lost, alienated, natural self."